FUEGO
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2007
- Messages
- 7,746
Around here, I can see the "getting bored" happening more often than running out of money given the high level of planning and factors of safety applied by the average poster.Spending the better part of the last 5 years at a staffing agency, I ran into a lot of stories from people who went back to work. There was every story imaginable and most of them were because they got bored and needed to get out of the house.
However, one particular story stands out most. I was interviewing a man in his mid 50's who had retired in his mid 30's with a real estate portfolio. He made it through 20 years of retirement but he came upon hard times. If I recall correctly, the recession hit him hard and his real estate holdings were in a particularly bad area that saw major declines (not all from the downturn but because of the area turning lower socio-economic which affected his rents).
He came to our organization looking for temp work in his previous industry. However, being 20 years out of the workforce, he was basically unemployable for anything over 12/hour. He knew that his cash was running short and he was being preemptive in finding additional cash flows.
That's one reason why I've shied away from real estate. I might end up doing really well, or find out that in 20 years I've bought in a neighborhood/city/state that's stuck in an economic death spiral.
And that $12/hr might be me in 20 years too. Luckily, that would cover a significant portion of our early retirement budget, so the worst case of running out of money doesn't strike me as particularly bad.